


Do Your Research

by dioscureantwins



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bad Parenting, Child Abuse, Dark, Drug Use, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Kid Mycroft, Kid Sherlock, Parent-Child Relationship, Psychic Violence, Psychological Trauma, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-05
Updated: 2015-10-05
Packaged: 2018-04-25 00:37:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4939960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dioscureantwins/pseuds/dioscureantwins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why I did it? The explanation is perfectly simple, if only you’d do your research.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do Your Research

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CherryBlossomTide](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CherryBlossomTide/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Proxy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/627349) by [CherryBlossomTide](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CherryBlossomTide/pseuds/CherryBlossomTide). 



> This story is a remix of CherryBlossomTide's fabulous Proxy. I strongly advise you to read that story first for otherwise this story won't make much sense to you.
> 
> Written for the fifth Sherlock remix challenge fest over at LJ. Please check out the other stories. They're fabulous.
> 
> Lots and lots of thanks to the lovely swissmarg for the wonderful beta.

Browncross Medium Security prison  
December 1995 (Christmas? Warden Philips looked especially grumpy this morning)

 

Dear Sherlock,

Well, isn’t this a wonderful surprise? I’m convinced the last thing you expected to find in your pigeonhole this morning was a letter from Mummy. Do rest easy, darling. This letter isn’t a nasty bomb about to explode in your face. Rather, accept it as a little getting to know me present, a belated gift for your eighteenth birthday. Then, I didn’t comply with your pleas. Now, I’ll make it up to you, the best I can.

Why this sudden change of heart, almost a year after your request, you’ll ask? Good question, but then, you’ve always been a clever little thing. I wish my answer could be something similar to ‘frailty, thy name is woman’. My teachers dedicated a huge part of my school career to repressing this regrettable trait of female nature. Obviously, the truth is far more mundane; I requisitioned these sheets of paper and a pen because I’m thoroughly bored. I almost wrote ‘bored out of my mind’, except that would be a pleonasm, wouldn’t it? Locked up as I am in what’s essentially a loony bin?

My present state of ennui is a direct consequence of your dear brother’s visit some time ago, ostensibly to inform me of your father’s unlamented demise. Categorically unlamented by me, and, considering the fact I made sure there was no love lost between the two of you, _and_ the fact that your father was a self-centred, pleasure-seeking bastard to begin with, I assume our sentiments upon receiving the news were alike. 

You didn’t seek solace in drugs when Mycroft told you, did you, sweetling? No doubt you looked divine in your new bespoke suit, rigged up purposely for the funeral. Dark colours always suited you, what with those black curls you sport. Did you match them with dark circles under the eyes and properly emaciated cheeks? Were your hands and legs trembling or did you shoot up in advance and pass the ridiculous rigmarole in a state of merciful oblivion? Oh my poor baby, when I think of all those tedious morons wearing you out with their mendacious eulogies. Well, good riddance, I say. If it weren’t for the facility’s strict no alcohol policy I’d raise my glass to bid Sigur Godspeed on his descent into Hell.

But I digress. Another tiresome result of the never-ending monotony, I assume. Apologies.

One day I was sitting in my cell, enjoying the temporary solitude as my cellmate was in the sickbay recovering from her attempt to do herself in – with a razor blade of all things, I haven’t the faintest where she managed to acquire it – when there was a rap on my door and the warden’s voice announced a visitor. For an instant I presumed the visitor to be you – even as a child you had an independent streak – so I was taken aback when the open door revealed Mycroft slipping into the room. Oh dear, he hasn’t improved with age, has he? At least he carries himself well and has a sense of dress, though, straight out, so had Sigur. Really, that man was so ridiculously vain, his wardrobe stocked more shoes than mine ever did. Still, I’ll admit he did cut a handsome figure in them right until the end, judging by the occasional photograph in the papers. 

Now who did Mycroft inherit that unfortunate nose from, I wonder. Sigur’s mother was a dragon, but she did have a dainty little snub nose, like a pug puppy. Your father’s was the spitting image of his father’s, both totally acceptable, and the family portraits that cluttered the walls in my parents’ house bore proof of a long lineage of Greek profiles. It seems nature played a nasty prank on your poor brother. Not on you, darling, thankfully, as the photographs you’ve sent me attest. I don’t remember your brother’s nose being that prominent when he was a child. Nevertheless, I instantly recognised him, despite not having seen him in twelve years.

Looking back upon Mycroft’s visit I realise I bungled it. Arrogance has been my downfall and when he walked into my cell, still visibly shaken from his stopover at your ‘digs’, I repeated my mistake and underestimated him again. He’s bound to go a long way in this world, I’m afraid. If Sigur had deigned to take a few leaves out of his son’s book he’d have ended up in that position he strived so hard to attain. Not that I fared any better. Forewarned is forearmed, as the saying goes, and after that surreptitious, backhanded trick Mycroft coaxed you into I should have let him do the talking and kept my mouth shut for the duration of his call.

However, I don’t want you to feel guilty, Sherlock dear. I don’t blame you for my predicament, honestly. My misfortune is entirely ascribable to that nasty, interfering brother of yours. You’re my baby and I know you don’t wish me ill. And you must believe me when I tell you I was utterly unnerved when I discovered what you’re doing to yourself. Please quit, my precious. It’s dangerous and – more importantly – pardon my French, outright disgusting. Abusing your body with substances won’t help you, only serve to make you sick and we don’t want that, do we? Even if upsetting your brother vindicates the vile habit you should stop it for the outcome, though laudable, isn’t worth the possible collateral damage. 

I speak with some authority, you know. Oh, don’t worry, you won’t have to slalom around any hereditary mines lurking beneath the surface. Sigur never drank more than was expected of a man in his social position and, save for a temporary stint with a few crates of whisky, of which I’ll tell you more later on, the most I’ve ever consumed in one sitting was two glasses of champagne. My father, I’ll admit, definitely did his best to drink himself to death. Alas, he was as big a failure at killing himself as at everything else he tackled in life. An ending as a raving lunatic in some mental institution would have been his just reward for all the torture he inflicted upon my mother but, unfortunately, fortune favours the wicked. One day his ignoring a traffic light led to a smash-up with bus 11, which was just then rounding the corner. He was killed instantly, leaving enormous chaos and five casualties who’d been propelled out of their seats in his wake. Mama, good soul that she was, spent the first days of her widowhood visiting them in the hospital, along with organising my father’s funeral.

Being locked up in an institution for the criminally insane does give one an insight into human weaknesses, though. Roughly fifty percent of the acquaintances I acquired in this place suffered from the results of past self-medication resulting in permanent injury. If they weren’t bonkers before they definitely were non compos mentis after. And you were such an exceptionally bright child. I hate the thought of you deliberately wrecking that beautiful brain of yours.

Your brother would bite off my head if he read this and claim I put more at risk than just your brain but we both know better than that dull oaf, don’t we, dearest?

Oh, but would you just look at me? Already two pages covered and all I’ve accomplished so far is some malicious gossiping. Perhaps the bard was right when he put those words into Hamlet’s mouth. Surely you didn’t send me all those lovely letters in the hopes of receiving a reply that mainly concerns itself with your sibling. Can you imagine I was delirious with bliss when I first held him in my arms? I don’t know about your father, he definitely acted like the essence of concern and being over the moon. You were the one to inherit Sigur’s flair for dramatics. Don’t ever overdo it, darling. The line between a skill and a flaw is precariously thin.

By the way, you will be pleased to learn I’ve endlessly read and re-read each of your letters and kept them all. Thank you for sticking so steadfastly to your side of the correspondence. You really are a devoted and loving son, my dearest. Of the many letters you sent, I liked the one with the sketch of the dissected mouse best. As you were but eight years old when you wrote that letter, I’m still impressed with the attention to detail in your execution of the tiny skeleton, especially your inspiration in shading the underside of the mouse’s dainty little ribs. I would have loved to watch you at it, with your tiny tongue peeking out between your lips in concentration like you used to. Which reminds me, do you still do that? Better rid yourself of the habit, Sherlock. What is viewed as adorable in a child is mostly judged distasteful in grown-ups. 

The letters are sitting on the little metal shelf opposite my bed. Until my recent relocation, I had them tied with a pretty ribbon, its colour the same emerald as the slivers in your irises. Regrettably the authorities, in their infinite wisdom, decreed it likely my change of circumstances might induce me to try and off myself, and forced me to relinquish it. How they think I’d succeed at strangling myself with a satin ribbon not a quarter inch wide and already unravelling at the edges is beyond me. Perhaps I ought to consider it a compliment. Alternatively, the whole business may be another example of Mycroft’s extreme pettiness. His eyes did widen when he noticed the ribbon. Overall that seems the most logical explanation. Oh my, he keeps cropping up in the correspondence like an annoying jack-in-the-box, doesn’t he? I’m sincerely sorry, sweetheart. It must pain you as much to read about him as it does me to write about him, meddlesome nuisance that he is. 

However, seeing as I’ve nothing better to do anyway, books and newspapers are past distractions now and even the contents of _HELLO_ magazine are deemed too exciting for my feeble mind, I might as well start on a belated reply to all those questions you raised over the years. I still think my rejection of your application for a visit was the most prudent course of action. After all those years of waiting and hankering after Mummy you were bound to be disappointed, and where’s the point in that? 

Luckily, right now our interests collide. We’re both bored halfway out of our minds, that is, I assume you must be – why else would you go to such desperate measures for relief? I really admire your nerve for I’ve always been afraid of needles. Every time I sat holding your tiny hand while the doctors stuck yet another of those horrible needles in your arm I averted my eyes but you never so much as whimpered. You were my little hero during all those months that ghastly ordeal lasted. 

A lot of the inmates here resort to self-mutilation. The pain offers a distraction, I suppose. Still, I wish the management would work harder at prevention for I always thought the sight of mutilated skin an assault on the aesthetics and this place already has precious little to offer in that category. Everlasting incarceration would be too lenient a punishment for the sadist who selected this particular shade of drab grey to decorate the walls of this hellhole. 

Let’s concern ourselves with more pleasant prospects instead. Here comes the grand disclosure, dear boy, of all those secrets Mummy was hoarding. I’ll answer your big question now. Oh, I’m aware you went to great pains to never pose it openly. As I wrote earlier, you _are_ clever. You already were at the age of six. What you didn’t count on, with all your circuitous phrasing, was a mother heart’s acumen. In spite of all your ingenuity, your hunger for enlightenment always screamed out of every word you put to paper. 

Well then, off on a proper start, shall we? Right at the beginning.

Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived at her parents’ home in Stratford Terrace. According to legend I was so eager to come into this world my mother didn’t make it to the telephone to ring a taxi before she was delivered of me. 

You really shouldn’t enquire why my father insisted on keeping his wife sequestered in war-ravaged London, especially as both of them hailed from an extensive family branched out all over the country, their tranquil homes much better suited to the needs of a young mother-to-be. I suspect he sought to model himself after Churchill, whom he imitated in everything else, from those noxious cigars to the appalling rotundity. In case you were wondering what Mycroft will look like in a few years, you only need hunt down one of the old family photographs. Distressing, isn’t it? You needn’t fear, darling, you take after your grandmother and me, and, in the teeth of the lack of exercise and having produced two children I’d still fit into my wedding dress, should anyone care to hunt the tattered remains and sew them together again.

I don’t know whether Sir Winston ever beat the living daylights out of Lady Churchill but that proved to be the only occupation my father truly excelled at, apart from drinking himself into a stupor at his club. Maybe one activity led to another and vice versa or it was his way of dealing with the disappointments life dealt him. In spite of all his hero-worshipping my father never made it out of the backbenches. My mother bore the brunt of his ineptitude, hiding the evidence beneath dresses that were always long-sleeved and high-necked, regardless of the vagaries of the weather. Even in that era, we’re talking the fifties here, a long-sleeved dress was deemed a bit eccentric for a lawn party.

Poor Mama. Father was perpetually infuriated with her, her every action feeding his resentment with new fodder, and she meekly bore each of his outbursts like a good little wife. She should have put arsenic in his coffee, except she was nowhere near Lady Astor’s league. Rather, I believe she was one of the dullest women who ever lived. On the other hand, it’s not done to speak ill of one’s Mama. They endure atrocious pains to bring one into this world.

My father’s principal grievance was my sex, which he saw as Mama’s fault and a deliberate slur on his manhood, especially as Mama, to all appearances, never conceived of another child. Of course, he might literally have been beating his sons out of her. Due to his profound stupidity I suspect that notion never crossed his mind. 

To protect me from the worst, and, as I only realised many years later, because she was close to exhausting her supply of excuses and subterfuges, Mama packed me off to her eldest sister at the age of seven, under the pretence of providing me with the best education money could buy. Aunt Tilda did in fact live a mere ten miles from the institution. Looking back on those formative years, I conclude location must have been its main accomplishment, in Mama’s eyes that is, for I don’t see what I was taught there that I couldn’t have learned equally well in London. 

It was a lonely childhood. Mama being the youngest, my cousins were closer in age to her than to me and ten miles is too much of a distance to strike up a friendship with one’s schoolmates. 

After thirteen long years spent amusing myself, first at home and later at aunt Tilda’s, boarding school came as a relief. Right from the start I was one of the most popular girls. At first this surprised me as, compared to the other girls in my class and dorm, I’d had little practice at initiating and maintaining a friendship. Some people, it seems, are born to reign and nature had equipped me with all the necessary accessories for dominating a class of teenage girls. 

I was generally considered good-looking, yet refrained from openly flaunting my assets. I came out top of my class and was always ready to help those less well-endowed in the brain department. I excelled at sports but whenever it was my turn to select a team I picked out a few of the slowest, clumsiest girls as well, a ploy that bought me their undying gratitude and a devoted army willing to assail the very gates of Hell on my behalf. 

I was such an industrious and good little girl; the mere idea makes me want to vomit. Believe me, darling, I’m not proud of the person I was at that age. Still, I promised to be honest with you and you mustn’t be too hard on me and remember the mitigating circumstances. At thirteen I was so pathetic and desperate for attention I’d gladly have sacrificed my right arm for some and all of a sudden the whole world was clamouring to put their name in my ball book. No backbenches for Violet. Not that my father ever exhibited the slightest interest in any of my endeavours, except when it came to my choice of a husband.

Basically, the school’s key mission was to equip young women of a certain social standing with the best papers for ‘a good catch’. My grades in classics and natural science were deemed less important than my level of execution of the classic waltz, and my top grades in French, German and Spanish merely turned me into top-notch diplomat’s wife material. 

All through the last terms I raised the subject of University – my grades undeniably warranted the notion – only to find the Headmistress actively aiding my father in quelling the whim. Mama, whom I begged for moral support in a last-ditch effort to stall the inevitable, declined immediately, as I’d known she would all along. The poor dear, she had tears in her eyes while she sat pressing my hand and murmuring something vague about following the path of least resistance and the joys of motherhood. 

Now, why didn’t I just run away, get myself a scholarship, and find a job to support myself, I can almost hear you asking. Oh darling Sherlock, don’t be deliberately obtuse, not all the world’s education would have helped me, a spoiled and pampered female representative of the upper middle classes, to gain what I was after against my parents’ expectations. My only way out of the conundrum was marriage. Mama’s advice, though not intended as such, was in fact remarkably astute.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the swinging sixties, dearest? They could have unrolled themselves in another dimension for the impact they had on my life. A Cheltenham girl like me, out to net a husband, was a goldfish, on display in her own impeccable crystal bowl. I was a beautiful specimen, wily, decorous and possessed of that season’s shapeliest legs. Men buzzed around me like flies over an open honey jar. You’ll notice I’ve dropped the goldfish simile. I had no intention of ending up as someone’s dinner. Whomever I’d marry was welcome to have me for breakfast, but he’d soon find out there was no such thing as a free lunch.

Which brings me to your father. Maybe I ought to have retained the goldfish comparison for he wooed me with the persistence of a cat that sits patiently abiding its time beside the bowl. We first met at a ball hosted at the French embassy and over the weeks that followed we happened to bump into each other at every social occasion that allowed young people of both sexes to mingle freely. Sigur Holmes was outrageously handsome, witty, an excellent sportsman and he topped off the whole glamorous, swashbuckling cocktail with the most resonant baritone outside the Royal Opera House. He was frequently spotted at that institution and various other venues devoted to the arts. His active membership on several charity committees added to the status he already enjoyed as the youngest representative of a formidable clan that had served the British Empire and its predecessors since Domesday. It was widely agreed the woman who’d snare him was an exceptionally lucky creature. 

Early on in his campaign he assured himself of his great-aunt’s assistance. A smart move as, to anyone whose opinion really mattered, her judgment was akin to alpha and omega. Soon, the whole of society favoured the match between the ravishing debutante and the young civil servant, whose career at just twenty-five was already skyrocketing to dazzling heights. 

Your grandmother, who would have invented snobbery if the notion hadn’t already existed, held out longest against me, but eventually she had to admit defeat when faced with the flagrant hordes clamouring for our union. Sigur’s father never uttered a word upon the topic. However, the whole Holmes tribe judged him an irrelevancy, whose opinion on any matter was disregarded habitually. Apparently, he never recuperated from the shock of Indian independence (he was born in Calcutta and his mother was buried there). He was a sweet man, by the way, and the only member of that family I truly took a liking to.

My parents wholeheartedly approved of the marriage. My father expected the connection to launch him out of the seat he’d been warming since time immemorial to one positioned closer to the heat of the action and my mother looked forward to dandling her grandchildren on her lap and escorting them to the park to feed the ducks on the Serpentine. 

Meanwhile, between kisses and caresses in Sigur’s Jaguar coupé I elicited his permission to follow all the courses I desired at University College once we’d been declared husband and wife. Together we trashed out the shortest socially acceptable engagement period. I was eager to escape the confines of my parental home and Sigur assured me daily he was just as eager to exchange his tiny bachelor flat for the more spacious flat at Grosvenor Square he’d taken leasehold on.

Given the school’s principal objective one would have thought sexual education took up a large part of the roster. Amazingly, all the instruction we received on the subject was the counsel to keep our thighs firmly closed whenever we found ourselves within less than three feet of any member of the opposite sex. Of course there was a lot of whispering among the girls and those with brothers or elder sisters appeared quite knowledgeable about the incitement’s underlying rationale. But I was a silly little goose, remember, so I never paid heed to those stories.

On the eve before my wedding day Mama came up to my room and offered to brush my hair (a hundred strokes each day to keep it shiny and healthy) so we could have a ‘heart-to-heart talk between mother and daughter’. Her gaze fluttered anxiously around the room to avoid meeting mine in the mirror and her voice dropped to a nearly inaudible level as she told me to brace myself for the unspeakable horrors Sigur would inflict upon me once we’d retired to the honeymoon suite. Lie back and think of your beautiful children, she commended with truly Victorian solemnity. By the end of the ten minutes our mutual misery lasted the ferocity of her skin tone would have put a beetroot to shame. In her nervousness she forgot to explain that in order to beget those beautiful children I’d have to part my legs at some point during the repellent proceedings, which, after years of exhortation not to, you’ll agree would have been sensible advice.

If I’d told her right then that I was desperate to find out what exactly your father had in store for me, the wedding would have to be postponed for a year at least. In those days that was still considered the proper period of mourning for an orphaned daughter. Instead I patted her hand and, with demurely lowered eyelids, thanked her for the motherly guidance. She sobbed and fled the room. In honour of my wedding day, I gave my hair a hundred extra strokes and went to bed. 

One’s parents’ sex life is a less than thrilling conversation topic. I can just see that lovely retroussé nose of yours wrinkling in disgust at the idea. More’s the pity, because I find myself unexpectedly enjoying this particular stretch of my trip down memory lane. So, to quote Mama, brace yourself, sweetheart, for the next few paragraphs. Or skip them, if that suits you better. I won’t be there to watch you reading this letter so it’s all one to me.

All the grappling in the back seat had never resulted in Sigur’s hands straying down my legs, let alone between them. Once, in the early days of our engagement, he took hold of my left buttock and I felt something hard nudge insistently at my right thigh. Warmth blossomed low in my abdomen and a wet patch bloomed in my underwear. I was mortified, especially when my body pressed itself into Sigur’s in a quest of its own. His teeth grazed the skin below my jaw, where my blood was flowing rapidly and his long fingers (he did have very, very long fingers) tightened almost painfully on my behind. My breath hitched. I felt him _growl_ against my throat. Then, swiftly, his hands returned to the safe zone above my waist and he shifted away from me to say we were already way past curfew and he didn’t fancy a dressing-down from his future mother-in-law. I obliquely laughed at the joke, mainly to hide my disappointment with the evening’s abrupt ending. In contrast, your father looked extremely smug all the way up to the front door.

My dear boy, you’ve never experienced anything but cold detachment between your parents, but you must believe me that once upon a time I was madly in love with your father. In love and in lust. I simply couldn’t wait for that interminable day – reputedly the happiest of my life – to end and the guests to depart, allowing Sigur and me to retire at last to the suite reserved at Claridge’s ‘for the purpose of our first night as husband and wife’. 

The following day I was equally loath to exchange the confines of the apartment for the taxi that was to take us to Heathrow and our flight to Paris. The prospect of visiting the Continent’s main cities was considerably less appealing than staying put and shagging each other into the mattress for the duration of our honeymoon. 

Oh dear, I do hope you’re not shocked by your mother using a four-letter word. Do be a darling and don’t tell Mycroft, will you? That would confirm his ridiculous bias of your Mummy as some nefarious corruptive influence on his precious baby brother, and I’d hate that.

Remember though, earlier in this letter I promised you complete frankness, and if I were to use one of those terms deemed more appropriate for women of my class to describe how your father and I filled the better part of those two months I would be doing the man an injustice. Sigur wasn’t just intimate with me, he didn’t restrict himself to making love to me; no, he taught me to _fuck_. Later I realised that incident in the car in front of my parents’ house had been a test, one which I had passed with flying colours. Should I have failed, he would have dug up a pretext to break off the engagement, great-aunts and London society be damned. 

But that understanding only dawned once I was able to properly think again. At the time all I experienced was gratification, in every sense of the word. The question how Sigur knew more about the workings of my body than I did never entered my mind and the sole plea I can raise in my defence is that I was too thoroughly blissed out of it to so much as consider the notion.

You know, it’s rather strange to contemplate that the babe once suckling my breast is now a young man who might be suckling another breast with different intentions while I’m sitting here writing these words. Or possibly you prefer boys. Don’t worry; unlike your father I won’t harangue you if you do. What I meant to say is that I do hope you and your – ah, sexual partner, that’s the done word, obviously – I do hope you and your sexual partner will enjoy a relationship as fulfilling and satisfying as I imagined your father and I were experiencing throughout those first years of our marriage.

Overall, I believe sex is a better drug than heroin or morphine or whatever substance you’re inserting into your veins, apart from the health issues. However, that’s my mother heart speaking up and, given that you’re of age now, you’re free to ignore my advice and shoot yourself straight up to cloud nine if such is your inclination. 

Perhaps you don’t like the idea of emotional entanglement, which, for the majority of humankind, is a prerequisite for the tangling of limbs. That would prove you don’t take after your father, which is a relief that surpasses any anguish I might feel over the possibility of you overdosing. At least you’ll die happy if you do. Your brother seems positively determined that you will. One more stick to beat me with; my poor back hurts from all the trashing he’s done. Except, naturally, he doesn’t know you as well as I do. He doesn’t comprehend you’re as impossible to be rid of as a patch of Bishop’s weed. One may slash you down, cut you off, pull your runners out of the earth, but you’ll always pop up again. You’ll live to be a hundred. Mycroft, on the other hand, should stop stuffing himself if he wants to make it past fifty.

Now back to that pitiful creature, your father. As a lot of men are nothing but whoring, self-centred scoundrels (not you, dear boy, you’re far too sensitive) of necessity lots of women end up in bed with one. Maybe I should be grateful that the rogue whose bed I shared was incredibly vain as well. He’d rather have cut his own throat than have a woman complain about his sexual prowess. In hunting them he didn’t chase his own orgasm, but gratification through his partner’s, whoever she was. Well, there are worse qualities in one’s lover, I presume, as long as one’s unaware of one’s rivals.

Which, of course, I blissfully was until much later. 

Back in London I took up the study of the Classics and my duties as a civil servant’s wife. Both Sigur’s mother and the great-aunt bombarded me with suggestions on the correct organisation of dinner parties, cocktail parties and afternoon teas. The first dinner party we threw was a notable success, thanks to the cook graciously lent us by the great-aunt. Before I knew it I was swept into the organising committees of four different charities. We were forever attending concerts and balls and showing ourselves at West End premieres, Sigur beaming proudly at the elegant wife adorning his arm. 

Silly little goose. Happy silly little goose. _Et in Arcadia ego…_ , I truly was. Somehow I’ve always had a soft spot for that expression. It conveys such a melancholy echo of a lost innocence, which, in spite of all our striving, cannot be regained. Had I been Eve, I would have refused to sample the Tree of Knowledge’s fruit. Instead, I would have chosen to step on that cursed snake’s head to silence its split tongue forever and I’d have thrown its filthy corpse over the Garden wall. Yes, Sherlock dear, much as I love you, I would happily have foregone your birth in exchange for never learning the truth about your father. 

Notwithstanding my blindness regarding my own situation, I was sharp when it came to surveying others. Gossip was the lynchpin of the society Sigur and I navigated and in chatting my way through formal dinners and lawn parties I discovered that my popularity at school hadn’t been ascribable, as I’d assumed, to my pretension at humbleness or my apparent willingness to socialise with the slow and the weak. Unconsciously I had _observed_ what others did to assure themselves of their comrades’ admiration and had _improved_ upon their posturing. Integrity is a seriously overrated quality. A fake smile is a faster road into somebody else’s good books than an honest scowl, no matter how warranted the latter may be. 

I, it turned out, was very good at swallowing with an attentive smile the hogwash other people liked dishing up while, from beneath modestly lowered lashes I studied the rumpling of their clothes, the flitting of their eyes, the way they shifted in their seat or held themselves milling around a room.

At night, in the privacy of our bed, we’d discuss my observations and compare them with the hard facts Sigur dug up out of the files that travelled his and his colleagues’ desks and the various tittle-tattle we’d encountered during the day. Between the two of us we established an outstanding intelligence service whose sole aim was the promulgation of Holmes & Co. Shallow, I grant you, but oh, it was _such fun_.

In less than a month I developed an expertise at exchanging a snippet of ineffectual chitchat for a piece of valuable information. Men, husbands and lovers especially, do so like to boast of their achievements to their bedpartner. My self-appointed task was to wrangle it out of those unfortunates, who were first burdened with confidences and then sworn to silence. The poor women were tripping over their toes to divulge their secrets and I received them with arms wide and my smirk hidden beneath a sympathetic smile.

Soon I was so busy ensuring Sigur would receive his CBE before his thirtieth birthday I had little time to spare for my studies. When I made excuses for not attending a tutorial the fourth time in a row my Professor suggested I take some time off to straighten my priorities. Thus ended my academic career, more fool I.

Half a year later my sacrifice (though, to do your father’s memory justice I like to add it didn’t feel as such) was rewarded with Sigur’s mention in that year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours Lists. He got his CBE at twenty-nine. We celebrated with champagne and the pledge of a knighthood before thirty-five. Our ultimate goal was the Order of the Bath. Modesty never became Sigur.

The world was our oyster, but, after having taken the first bulwarks by storm we hit upon fierce pockets of resistance as we tried to conquer the citadel. Remember, Sherlock dear, these were the sixties and our country was at heart still deeply conservative. Many considered motherhood a woman’s ultimate destiny. At twenty-two, the notion held little appeal and luckily Sigur didn’t picture himself as a father yet either. In which he revealed remarkable self-knowledge for he transpired to be downright rotten at the job.

So, together we withstood the tide of popular opinion for another three years. Then, after enduring another long evening of scarcely veiled enquiries of possible health problems impeding my attainment of that most blessed state of women (such was your paternal grandmother’s favourite expression, which perfectly illustrates her preposterousness), I succumbed to the pressure and we decided to have a baby.

Four months later I was pregnant with Mycroft. The Fates themselves must have decreed your brother should be the result of this deliberate career decision. Ultimately fitting, but a strange outcome of the act of love. Oh yes, darling, even after almost seven years of marriage I remained heavily enamoured of Sigur, who professed to passionately return the sentiment. As he should, for that CBE was my achievement as much as his.

Quickly conceived but my, your brother took his own interminable time coming into this world. All in all the birth went on for forty bloody hours, a stretch of time that far outlasted my vocabulary of expletives. About halfway through I became convinced God hated me.

Have you ever seen that photograph on your father’s desk of me smiling exhausted into the camera while Sigur beams down at me and the small bundle I’m cradling? That’s the three of us, one hour after Mycroft finally deemed it worthy to emerge. He was completely silent and lay studiously observing the exhausted members of the team that had assisted bringing him into this world, myself included. The gynaecologist had to slap his bottom a few times before he succumbed to the indignity of emitting his first wail. Oh, the pride and happiness that surged in my chest as his shrieks tortured my eardrums. At heart, maternity is a brain-softening disease. 

Sigur presented me with a Boodles ruby ring that every female visitor cooed over, with the baby disregarded in his cot on the other side of the bed. Poor Mycroft. His Holy Grail is recognition but all he’ll ever encounter is a kick in the teeth, no matter the amount of power he’ll amass. His soul simply lacks the purity that’s de rigueur for any knight embarking upon that quest. 

He was such a model baby. After those first vigorous cries he kept his protests to a minimum except for a polite wail to prod me or the Nanny into changing his nappy every few hours. However, most people considered his quietness and steady gaze disconcerting. He didn’t improve matters when, at two months, he began startling unwitting visitors bending over his cot or innocent passers-by glancing into his pram by throwing them a frankly terrifying smile. 

Small wonder he later invented such ridiculously pompous mottos as ‘caring is not an advantage’. He could have got away with those if he hadn’t been the first to refute them. His Nannies usually gave notice after a few months because they couldn’t stand the imploring looks he fixed them with as they put him to bed. If your brother had been more of a man and less needy I wouldn’t be sitting here writing you this letter.

Naturally, right then I was still floating on my oxytocin-fuelled cloud. The brain is such a diligent chemical factory. Thanks to the steady stream of soothing substances it supplied me with I handled the hiring of new Nannies with light-hearted ease and was able to endure Sigur’s mother’s steady flow of critique (for, obviously, I did nothing right) with the same light-heartedness.

Until the evening, when, intending to brush Sigur’s jacket before hanging it in the airing closet, I spotted the blonde hair on the left shoulder, close to the collar. It was quite thick and smelled faintly of that horrible cheap hairspray women of the lower classes used to create the unflattering hairdos that were all the rage those years, mingled with Sigur’s (outrageously expensive) cologne. 

Oh god, the hackneyed tediousness of my predicament. Loving mother and industrious housewife and career-builder discovers her husband is cheating on her. I could have starred as a soap opera heroine. At least I didn’t lower your father and myself by creating a scene. No, I put the hair into a box on my vanity, brushed the jacket and hung it in the closet. 

We had resumed full relations as soon as my gynaecologist allowed me to. Too numb with shock I didn’t resist when, half an hour after my discovery, Sigur drew me to him and began dropping kisses along my throat. Our coupling that night felt as insensate as that of the beasts in the field. Sigur mistook my shivers of horror for those of pleasure as I endured his hands pawing my body. For the first time in our marriage, I faked an orgasm just to have the torture over and done with. Soon after Sigur fell asleep. I left the bed and went to look at our child, who requited my stare with a steady gaze as if he understood the world better than I ever could.

At breakfast I informed Sigur of my discovery and consecutive decision of spending some time with Mama and Mycroft at my aunt’s to weigh up the marital consequences. Your father had the decency to nearly choke on his toast. If only he’d actually done so. Except, that would have meant you would never have been born, so perhaps it’s better Sigur managed to bring up the offending piece and spit it rather indelicately into his serviette. You might hold another view on the matter. In fact, you seem to; oh well, it’s your life now and I can’t stop you.

Later, at aunt Tilda’s, the ensuing scene replayed itself in my head, like a snippet of music struck up time and again until the needle is lifted out of the scratch and lowered into the next groove. It slowly dawned on me the sheer inanity of Sigur’s reaction to my revelation might be my salvation. 

You’ve already guessed what he did, haven’t you, like the clever boy you are? 

Oh yes, he began denying my accusation, the glib lies spooling from his mouth as smoothly as liquid honey from the back of a spoon. His arguments harped on two themes mostly; that of declaring the notion preposterous as he was the happiest of men and would be a fool to risk his felicity for the sake of a quick fuck, while the other concerned itself with praising my beauty, no doubt in the hopes of tickling my vanity.

I endured the palaver for five minutes, all the while studying the movements of his face, the knot of his tie, the surge of his jacket over his shoulders, the way those long fingers of his played with his fruit knife. He had such beautiful hands, your father, so slender and mobile and soft with just a faint smattering of fine blonde hairs close to the wrist. The knife’s ebony hilt highlighted their almost luminescent paleness. Thanks to a single hair lodged in soft cashmere those hands, whose touch I’d craved on my skin, reminded me of an octopus’ tentacles, and I recoiled at the idea of their cold, slimy suckers slithering over and gluing themselves to my flesh.

With the veil ripped away from my eyes those five minutes sufficed to fill in the few blank spots left in the sordid tale of Sigur’s adultery. First in the troupe had been a brunette, fished out of the typing pool when I was in my seventh month. As advised by my gynaecologist we’d ceased having vaginal intercourse two weeks earlier (I will never forget the look on the man’s face when I asked him whether it was all right for Sigur to continue to pleasure me. The answer was a strangled ‘no’). Of course I’d been keen and happy to service your father through other means, but, well, as I explained earlier, his interest lay in a different aspect of the game.

Should Sigur have chosen not to prevaricate I might have listened to whatever defence he built for himself, perhaps, in an outlandish fit, have elected to forgive him. His instinct to try and feed me fibs – me, the woman whose analytical intuition he’d so often laughingly praised – sealed the lid firmly on that end. 

Halfway through a fresh panegyric on my plethora of charms I raised myself from the table to advise him he was welcome to screw the whole of London as he would no longer be screwing me. Coarse language does have its advantages. The look of surprise on Sigur’s face sparked the adrenalin jolt I needed to propel myself out of the breakfast room and that blighted house with my head raised high.

Oh, the crying I did once we were at aunt Tilda’s. Naturally, my sweet mother couldn’t make head or tail of my sudden impulse and I didn’t care to enlighten her. However, our stay provided her with a breather from my father’s fists so rather than asking me questions I’d have to answer with lies she seized the chance to bounce Mycroft on her lap until he looked positively green around the gills. Grandmother and grandson enjoyed the happiest time of their lives, gurgling at and eying each other in a sickening manner that sent everyone flocking from the room.

Meanwhile, I spent my days either roaming the countryside, leaving the house before dark and returning well past suppertime, or locked in the guestroom. I won’t bore you with the bitter self-reproach I flogged myself with, nor the hateful invective my mind hurled at your father. That my options were limited was already clear to me as I fired my parting shot in the breakfast room. I could either swallow my pride and revulsion and return to your father or ask for a divorce and return to my parents. Both recourses held little appeal. A third alternative flitted through my brain and I spent one long afternoon perched on the top of the cliffs and staring at the surging crests perpetually pounding themselves into a spray of oblivion against the rocks a hundred feet below me. It was the closest I came to killing myself, but in the end I resolved I’d rather murder Sigur and spend the rest of my days in prison than grant him such an easy way out of my troubles.

I probably should have written the regard for my young and helpless child kept me from such desperate measures. Well, we both know better, don’t we, sweetheart? Besides, most people would claim I’m not exactly an advertisement for motherhood so why add insult to injury and confess to a consideration that didn’t once enter my head. It might have – if Mycroft hadn’t been constantly hungering after love and attention.

At last, the thirst for revenge was what made me sit down at the small escritoire in aunt Tilda’s drawing room and pen a truce offer to Sigur. I needed him to keep myself and Mycroft fed and clothed, but Sigur needed us for something far more important; his prestige, that coveted Knighthood, and – once that was in the bag – that most magnificent jewel in the Holmes’ family crown… the Order of the Bath. 

My terms were short and to the point: separate bedrooms, no touching except in a public situation that warranted a demonstration of affection and absolute discretion on his part with respect to his whores. I didn’t want to find so much as a flake of their plebeian skin on my upholstery. 

In exchange, I offered my tireless devotion to the cause, with Sigur, obviously, as the principal beneficiary of my efforts. The cause’s nature, as well as that of my efforts I left open to interpretation.

The reply came by telegram. Like I said before, Sigur did have a love of dramatics.

Thus, to your grandmother’s mortification, off our little train went to London again. Your father awaited us at Victoria station, hastening to assist Mama on her descent from our compartment. Mycroft beamed up at him, nearly delirious with the excess of kisses showered all over the top of his bald skull. I proffered my cheek for a chaste peck before striding off to leave Sigur dealing with our luggage.

Back at Grosvenor Square I had our former bedroom stripped bare and redecorated and the third guestroom revamped into a walk-in closet and private bathroom for Sigur. I didn’t skimp on expenses, giving in to the perverse thrill that coursed through my veins as I ordered fabrics and furniture by virtue of the hefty price tags they carried rather than their inherent aesthetics. Several times I caught Sigur pursing his lips as he read the bills, but he footed them all without complaint. Neither did he upbraid me over the loss of the Boodles ruby, which I flushed down the toilet on my first night back in London. Who has ever heard of a fighter wearing jewels when he enters the arena?

To round off the preparations, I ravaged my wedding dress. Stuffing the shreds of costly shot silk into the trash sent a thrill of unholy merriment crackling down my spine.

My absence was soon glossed over and I threw myself at my duties with renewed vigour, for all the world ceaselessly canvassing on Sigur’s behalf. We sat grinning through dinners and yawning discreetly behind the back of our hands through an endless parade of christenings, weddings, funerals and all those other vapid social occasions invented by the devil himself as a punishment for our sins. Have you ever endured the mind-numbing besiegement of a High Church service in a damp and draughty chapel with nothing but a thin sliver of leather sole and transparent nylon netting between your feet and the freezing floor? Believe me, I frequently desired the ground would split open, toppling the congregation into the eternal flames, to leave me feeling toasty at last. 

The sole thought that kept me smiling tranquilly upward as the Minister’s vapid outpourings floated over the top of my head was the image of the tiny teeth steadily sawing away at the chair legs of the fornicating reprobate seated on my left. Oh, I was careful, always careful. Just a quick nod here and a faint blush and lowering of my eyelids there, refraining from a comment where formerly I would have rushed to daub the breach in the ramparts of Sigur’s reputation. 

With the patience and determination of a gardener tending his inconveniently situated grounds atop a rocky sea cliff, I tilled the soil and planted my seeds. They were nothing, just the tiniest flecks of doubt on Sigur’s overall character. Most of them were doomed to wither and die instantly; indeed, the stability and trustworthiness of the Holmeses is one of our Realm’s founding pillars. 

Sigur considered himself unassailable. His favourite play was _Henry V_. He would have done better to engage in a comprehensive study of _Othello_. The years I spent listening to and distributing insipid nonsense had taught me people like nothing better than chancing upon a nugget of slander, however tiny. Their ears will perk up and their tongues start wagging to repeat the information and enhance the tale’s lurid details to smooth along its journey. An idea, once planted, is impossible to remove. Eventually, its roots will burrow themselves into the rock and, slowly but decidedly, dig deeper and deeper until the rock that appeared so mighty and powerful must give way and crumble… and fall.

Yes, such are the wicked ways of this world, darling. Parents are supposed to dispense sound advice to their children and set them a good example. I’m afraid your father and I both rather failed regarding the latter. As to the former the best advice would be to trust no one, except for your mother that is. No one but you yourself and your mother has your interests at heart. 

Your father trusted me, even after his betrayal. At the time, I thought his confidence more proof of his arrogance, which may have been an injustice. Perhaps it was closer to a mark of his _naiveté_. The notion of ill will on my part simply never entered his head. Fundamentally, all his cleverness notwithstanding, he was a profoundly stupid man.

The publication of the Queen’s Honours Lists were my annual highlights, more festive than Guy Fawkes Night and Christmas combined. To all appearances, Sigur bore the bi-annual news of his omission with manly equanimity. Oh, he was such a prime model of the British stiff upper lip. That trait in itself ought to have earned him that damned Knighthood, looming so near and yet proving itself so maddeningly elusive. 

Naturally, I, the devoted wife, commiserated with him, both in private and at his parents’ home. I was living it up as I sat lamenting and complaining and unreservedly adding my spite and bitterness to the cup that was already overflowing with outrage at the treatment doled out to Sigur. My magnificent rants would have sent Her Majesty herself dashing to right the wrong inflicted unjustly upon my beloved spouse… if only she could have heard them.

Alas, all good things must come to an end. For all his self-absorption, your father wasn’t completely oblivious to his surroundings. One day he returned early from the office and the noise of his key scraping over the front door lock informed me something was off. Mycroft was at Mama’s and I didn’t expect the chauffeur to drop him off for another half hour at least. Two weeks earlier he’d turned seven and he was already such a mature and responsible child I had no qualms about him letting himself in and out of our home with his own key. I shut the book I was reading and attached my customary bland smile to my face. 

Sigur’s, when he entered, was livid with rage, his handsome features morphed into a rictus of hate. He zoomed upon me with the determination of a peregrine falcon stooping a turtledove, taking the hurdle of the coffee table in the stride of his long legs. Those beautiful, slender fingers proved to be surprisingly strong as they closed themselves around my throat and he dragged me up from the sofa.

“You bitch,” he snarled. Warm drops of saliva splattered my cheeks. I was so numbed with fear the idea of raising my hand to wipe them off never entered my head. “You vile muckraker, you whore… You promised, all those years ago, promised to honour and obey… How dare you? Sully the name I gave you… The vile slander…”

Each word was a turn of the spanner further tightening the grip of his hands on my throat. Faintly, I attempted to scrabble at his hands with fingers that already felt weakened from lack of oxygen. As sudden as he’d lifted me, he let go and I crashed against the sofa, the back of my head colliding hard with the armrest’s elaborate mahogany scroll. I still believe I must have passed out for an instant.

Sigur’s hands tearing at my underwear revived me. I fought him with my hands and my teeth, I screeched bloody murder, I tried to spit in his face but he was stronger and the sheer length of his body put me at a disadvantage. He wrenched his hips between my legs and, right there on the _Aubusson_ carpet that covered the floor of our drawing room, holding my arms with one hand over my head, he raped me.

That’s how you were conceived, my precious.

Whatever can have possessed _Sigur_ of all men to avail himself of this particular act of aggression would have been a moot point for a psychiatrist, should your father ever have condescended to prevail himself of one’s services. As he considered them all quacks of the worst kind I’m fairly certain he didn’t. Having endured hours of torment in the form of so-called therapy myself, I tend to – reluctantly mind you – share your father’s opinion.

Does Mycroft employ one, though, I wonder? Because Sigur was halfway through leveraging himself and tucking himself inside his trousers again, when the door opened to reveal your brother’s small figure.

“Mummy? Daddy?” he asked, his gaze flitting between us. Sigur leapt up and shoved past him, leaving me to account for the incongruous sight of his mother with her skirts flung up around her waist and his father knelt between her legs and zipping himself up.

Fortune is a faithful mistress, no matter how hard a disgruntled wife may strive to thwart her. The next day Mama died of a heart attack. This occurrence nicely explained my abrupt disappearance from Sigur’s side at public occasions and the time lapse to fabricate a conceivable fairy tale for my social demise. 

Because we’d descended into open war. Every so often Sigur stormed into my room to launch increasingly obscene invective at me but all I would do was turn my back on him, take another swig of the whisky bottle I was nursing and screw my eyes shut until he made himself scarce, huffing his exasperation. He knew better than to bring up the threat of a divorce and, even with my mind locked in a dank gaol of despair, I was determined not to grant him one. I’d rather have died first. Although the whisky swilling was more an act of defiance than an actual attempt at doing myself in.

Frankly, I don’t know what became of your brother during those weeks. The poor boy presumably mourned his grandmother, the only person to love him truly and not let herself be disconcerted by his penetrating stares. Our cleaning lady, a Mrs Wilkinson I’d chosen for her trustworthiness rather than her actual housekeeping abilities, kept him fed and clothed probably, as he’s still exasperatingly alive today. I heard the soft padding of his feet in front of my bed multiple times but never deigned to react. He always took care to close the door very softly upon leaving.

I’d rather have died first, I wrote a few sentences back. Oh Sherlock dear, those words were meaningless until the day it dawned on my befuddled mind I was with child. A look at the calendar told me I was in my fourth month.

Are you acquainted with London at all, dearest? I’ve never gone to the trouble of finding out where you went to live after I was whisked out of the hospital straight into prison. Anyway, if you happen to be in London one day, do visit Grosvenor Square and have a look at the terraces of houses standing there. The height of the windows will give you a fair idea of the height of the staircases inside those flats. The instant I realised my predicament I didn’t hesitate and flung myself down ours. I reckoned I’d either break my neck or lose the child. Both options held equal appeal. Instead, I ended up in hospital with two broken legs, several fractured ribs and a broken arm and you kicking me triumphantly in the belly as I clawed my way back to consciousness after surgery.

I refused to eat. They inserted a feeding tube up my nose. I ripped it out. They re-inserted the tube and tied my hands to the bed. Nurses being what they are – and yes, they are a race of inquisitive bitches worse than the wardens at this place – the puzzle of my physical injuries and voluntary fast was soon solved and – for your safety’s sake – I was committed to remaining in the hospital until after my deliverance.

You were far quicker than Mycroft about the tedious business. Two weeks early and in less than an hour the job was done. Your lusty cries rang around the room, the maternity ward, the hospital wing and the whole cavernous building itself. I was the only one deaf to your shrieks, laid out on my side to stare at nothing while biting back the agony of the milk surging painfully against the flesh of my breasts, called forth by your hunger. 

During my months as a guest of the NHS I’d become immune to their prattle about having my interest at heart. _They_ had forced their treatment upon me against my will. Now _they_ had got what _they_ had so avidly desired, their _valuable_ babe, never mind I hadn’t wanted it all along, and _I_ , for certain, was not going to deal with _their_ problem, come hell or high water.

When they tried to wrap my lame fingers around a bottle I didn’t grasp it but let the bottle roll down onto the sheets, where it gained momentum and tumbled over the edge of the bed. After the third attempt they gave up and tried to bottle-feed you themselves instead. You adamantly rejected the teat, twisting your head to the side, and when they forced it into your screeching mouth you didn’t grasp it with your lips to start sucking eagerly but hitched your wails up a notch. 

Next they tried wrapping my arms around you, which, save for a quick dive by a young nurse, would have wound up with you following the same course as the bottle as I pushed you away with my eyes screwed shut as tight as my facial muscles allowed.

After twenty-four hours both nurses and doctors were desperate. You were yelling your head off as soon as someone merely looked at you, refused all sustenance, and – having been thin to begin with thanks to your Mummy indulging in a four-month binge after your conception – were losing weight rapidly. Mycroft was the one who saved you. Doctors and nurses had left the room to confer what to do next when he plucked you from the cot where you lay hollering, clambered onto the hospital bed with you screeching in his arms and deposited you onto the mattress in front of me.

“Look, Mummy, the baby really wants to eat,” he said. I opened my eyes to catch his’ verging away from the wet patches on the front of my gown and then my gaze swept down and came to rest on the crown of your head with its adorable nest of black curls. Your tiny fists scrabbled at the cloth of my night gown and the instant your questing mouth found a nipple it began suckling urgently, relieving my breast of the maddening pressure. The whole hospital breathed a collective sigh of relief at the peace and quiet descending over the premises. Behind me, I felt Mycroft slide off the bed. My hand came up to support your head, revelling in the silky softness of your hair, and you opened your eyes and looked at me. From that moment, I have loved you. More fiercely than any mother has ever loved her child.

How Mycroft must have mourned his impulse afterwards; the biggest blunder he ever committed. Perhaps he’d been snivelling in his room over the loss of Mama – I never asked – and that was the rationale behind his impulse of compassion. Whatever his motive, in saving you he cut the last threads of motherly feeling running between us. I had only that much love to give and, inevitably, from the moment I first held you in my arms must give it all to you.

He should have let you rot in that crib. I’d felt no compunction in doing so and I wouldn’t have given in to the personnel’s demands if they’d threatened to have me executed for being the worst mother in the world. 

Except, they couldn’t very well do that after Mycroft’s intervention, could they? Not when I had quieted you so effectively and was close to smothering you with my love, looking daggers at anyone who so much as tried to touch you. Being a bunch of interfering nuisances the doctors and nurses next began upbraiding me for breastfeeding you, which was, in those times, not ‘the done thing’ for a woman of my class. I sighed and turned my back on them – over the course of the past months I’d become quite the expert at doing just that. You followed along seamlessly, seeking my other nipple and I could have sworn your lips quirked before attaching themselves to my breast. 

Everything became so much easier after that. The next time Mycroft visited his gaze glued itself to the back of your head –the only visible part of you as you lay feeding at my breast – with the tenacity of a barnacle on a tidal rock. A nurse who came in to take my temperature told him off for staring so openly at my breasts, not daring to speak to me after the tongue-lashing I’d given her that morning, and I lazily corrected her.

“You’re just watching your lovely new brother, aren’t you, sweetheart?” Mycroft nodded – what else could he do? – and lowered his lids in a vain attempt to hide his blazing hate.

Over the course of the following days, I tracked his internal struggle. With a resolution almost frightening to behold in a seven-year-old, he _willed_ himself to love you. He had perceived, quite astutely, that you were the turnpike he couldn’t bypass if he wanted to follow the way into my heart. Oh my, you really set a rather high rate. As soon as anyone lifted you out of my arms you’d start wailing with the loud insistence of a siren announcing World War III and the Fall of the Heavens. Nonetheless Mycroft persisted in holding you in his lap for minutes at a time – the longest he managed was half an hour, at the end of which your body was red all over from your continuous crying – with a serene expression on his face. Sigur, the one time he tried to pick you up, almost let you drop, and Mycroft was the one quick enough to catch you, encumbered as I was by the heaviness of my breasts.

During that same visit your father and I determined I’d be more at leisure with the children at the old rectory his family still owned, down in Surrey. A throng of builders and carpenters and painters was sent off to convert the hovel into something inhabitable whither I took off a few months later, leaving London society to their own devices and Sigur to his trollops.

For appearances’ sake, your father stayed with us every other weekend. I don’t know how he kept himself amused through those weekends; slept with the gardener’s wife probably, a cheap tart if ever I saw one. Initially, he tried to engage Mycroft in boisterous father-and-son activities like fishing or clay pigeon shooting but all he drew was a blank. Mycroft was opposed to legwork to begin with and he had firmly cast his lot with ours. The three of us could have passed for the Holy Trinity. However divided internally, we presented a firm front to the rest of the world.

Mycroft went to the village school five days a week. Of course, he didn’t make any friends there – excepting the Headmaster, who gloated at the prospect of commanding a genius’ education. I suspect Mycroft maintained his rank at the top of the pecking order thanks to a crafty employment of snobbism mixed with a hint of danger. His clothes were always clean and his face and hands free from any discolouration evincing the healthy pursuit of fisticuffs with mates. The one friendship he struck up was with the owner of the corner shop. Her kindliness was no doubt heavily motivated by the profits on the ludicrous amounts of sweets she sold him.

Meanwhile you…

Oh, darling. Oh, my precious, darling boy, how I adored you. You were so clever, so quick. At three months – when all Mycroft could do was flash that horrid smile – you flipped yourself from your back onto your belly and back again. At four months, you tigered around the drawing room. I’ll never forget the look of triumph on your face when you first stayed seated on your tiny, wobbly bum for a whole seven seconds. Nor that of hurt dignity when – slowly but inescapably – you toppled over onto your side.

I was your inexhaustible playmate as we progressed from building blocks to tangram to chess . A handyman built you a treehouse on the lowest branch of the beech tree in the back garden and an outdoor swing and another one in the passage between the drawing and the dining room for the rainy days. You sat on those swings hours at a time, always demanding I’d push you harder so you would soar higher, ever higher into the sky. 

Your favourite game was hide and seek, which you insisted on calling ‘detecting’. I’d have to go and hide myself somewhere, preferably in a spot where I could lie down as silent as the grave, and you’d go find me and invent a whole ruse to explain why I was lying there and not in any of the other hiding places the house provided in abundance.

The instant you heard the garden gate’s creak you became another child; openly hostile, hiding behind my legs with your little fists knotted into my skirts. At the shops and out on the streets you’d bare your perfect little teeth to anyone bending over to talk to you or pat the mop of curls that reminded them of the reproductions of frolicking Renaissance cherubim so popular in the early eighties. If they persisted and, worse, addressed you, you’d start to howl. 

You endured Mycroft’s presence rather than welcoming it. Mycroft was patient however, as patient as a fox guarding the hole the vole must abandon in search of food. Steady and consistently, with little acts of kindness, he won your love, until the day came when you ran up to the garden gate as fast as your small legs would carry you to welcome your big brother on his return from his daily pursuits. Fiery threads of molten lava rose in me as you wormed your way out of my arms and down from my lap to welcome another’s company. Neither you nor Mycroft noticed anything though. At your return to the secluded spot beneath the gnarled old apple tree with your brother in tow the idyll had been restored with a laid tea table and Mummy waiting to serve you your tea and your anchovy paste sandwiches and slices of fruitcake.

That night I cried after a decade of forgoing the activity. The nasty thorn in my side that was your brother had cropped up like a pest in our rose garden to topple my pedestal. Your unwitting response to Mycroft’s relentless manoeuvres drove home the message I’d been ignoring, soothed into a lull by the sweetness of our embraces. Others would follow where he had trodden, to try and draw your love and attention away from me. Sooner or later, the day would arrive when you’d pay heed to one of those calls. You’d leave me, and I would be so lonely I might as well die.

Unless…

Unless I found a means of tying you to me through a bond stronger than that between mother and child. 

All through the dark hours I lay tossing and turning between the sheets, my mind whirring away with the speed of a light particle hurtled across the universe while I suffered every emotion between aching solitude, keen despair and faint flickers of hope.

By the time you padded over to my bed to wake me, as you did every morning, I had hit upon the solution to my quandary. 

Always, always Mycroft was silently watching me, and Sigur, you, in short, everyone. Over the years, I’d grown a finely wrought hauberk as a ward against his constant scrutiny. The morning after that dreadful day and night I stood preparing breakfast in the kitchen, my back turned to where you were both sitting at the kitchen table, when I felt Mycroft’s gaze sliding through my armour with the smooth ease of a sharpened steel cutter. In corollary, a shiver slithered down my spine, beneath my flowery summer dress that suddenly felt as heavy and unpleasant as a coat of shame. 

“Would you like tomatoes with your eggs, sweetheart?” I managed to ask in a perfectly tranquil voice.

“Yes please, Mummy,” Mycroft replied politely while you raised an eclectic chant of No!’s to a percussion accompaniment for fisted cutlery and wooden table top.

I served you both your eggs and brushed my hand over your brother’s shoulder to cast a spell of protection against his evil eye as I poured him his milk. Feigning surprise, he looked up at me. Our eyes locked and we smiled at each other. Our mutual acknowledgement lasted such a long time you recommenced thumping the table, outraged at being disregarded. A slight you, adorable little tyrant that you were, deemed insupportable.

Fair, Mycroft was a disingenuous little bastard. But, unfair, as his parent and by dint of being older, I called the shots. That weekend Sigur visited. I waited until we were seated around the dining table –pretending to be an ordinary family – before I brought up the subject of Mycroft’s education. Your father obliged me by confirming Mycroft – in time-honoured Holmesian tradition – would be sent down to Eton at thirteen. Mycroft’s face took on an aspect of a remarkably unattractive halibut as he sat opening and closing his mouth in obvious discomfit, necessitating me to remind him of his manners. My remark prodded him into action and he began protesting his father’s announcement. Undeterred by my gentle remonstrations to adapt a more lenient attitude towards the boy, Sigur sent Mycroft up to bed without dessert; strawberry Pavlova, if I remember correctly. 

Your brother threw me a gander of hate that set the hairs on my neck burning with the rage. 

“Good night, sweetheart,” I said. “Oh, don’t fuss so, Sherlock. Regard the situation as a good example instead. That’s what you get for not listening to your father.”

Thus, the groundworks were laid to prepare your innocent little soul for the inexorable shock of Mycroft’s eventual betrayal of your trust, after his ardent professions of love. Really, whom could you rely on but Mummy who knelt down beside you to hush your cries and dry your tears when that sly traitor boarded the Bentley where Sigur sat waiting behind the steering wheel to whisk him off to a new future, overflowing with happy friends? 

Mummy was the one who remained with you, who swept you up into her embrace and carried you to the kitchen to pour you some pineapple juice. 

You had such a sweet tooth, you loved sugary sweet drinks and pineapple juice was your favourite, which came out advantageous to my plans. Its saccharine sweetness perfectly masked the taste of the strychnine I used. Never too much, dearest. Just a pinch, I didn’t want you to feel too ill. All I sought to create were the symptoms of sickness, a need for you to cling to me, to keep me close to your side, always. The first time I smothered you with your cushion I told you it was a game, our secret for us to enjoy, and let you push the cushion over my face in turn. Your pain was my pain. And always, always, awake and asleep, I was near. I was there to brush your damp curls out of your face when you panicked, it was my hand that held yours throughout all the trials and tribulations they made you suffer in the hospital.

By now you’ll understand those wild accusations your brother threw at me were utterly without foundation. You were the one truly good and precious thing that had happened to me in my life. I’d never hurt you, never _kill_ you, I’d rather have cut off my own hand. With the knife bloodied from cutting my heart out of my chest first. 

Mycroft was a bad loser and rather than giving in graciously to his defeat he sought to drive us apart. But he hasn’t succeeded, now has he, dearest heart of mine?

The warden is rapping on my door, which means it’s suppertime already. The hours have flown by while I sat writing this letter. Perhaps I should pursue the exercise more often for the clock has been ticking even slower than it used to since my transfer to this unit. On the other hand, all the skeletons are out of the cupboard and – upon examining the sorry heap of bones – you might choose to change sides and walk over to your brother.

Oh, that… 

No, I won’t contemplate…

Luckily – for me that is – Mycroft, in his stupendous sagacity, has decreed I’m not allowed to receive visitors nor engage in a correspondence – with anyone, so that includes you. That simpleton Philips went out of her way to point out the decree while handing me the paper, as if I would have forgot. No doubt the prison is stretching every rule in the handbook of the European Convention of Human Rights, but, thanks to Mycroft’s careful instructions, no one will snitch on them. He’s so clever, that elder brother of yours. 

Though it seems, with his instructions, he’s rather shot into his own foot, wouldn’t you agree? I hardly could contain my glee while I sat confessing my dreary history to you, in the certainty I need not curb myself for I would tear up the paper upon reaching the end. I’m sincerely weighing the pros and cons of eating the scraps in a great show of dramatics and defiance. However, perhaps, I’ll save that for later, when that moronic Philips is spying on me.

For now I’ll enjoy the sweet irony of Mycroft’s predicament. He’s as well aware as I that the ‘Great Mystery of Mummy’ will live on in your mind – at his express injunction. You’ll continue to despise him for rescuing you, no matter how hard he works to regain your love. Should you – which I pray God forbid – indeed do yourself in one day, he will realise that in separating us he has murdered you, as surely and effectively as if he had inserted the needle into your arm himself. After accusing me of the act, he will have to carry the burden of actually having committed it.

The idea carries a modicum of elegance, I think. He should be exceedingly proud for building himself such a devilishly tight cage in his own personal hell. For as long as you live he must submit to the exquisite torture of the horrid scenarios his mind furnishes him with, without a hope of ever escaping them. My death won’t release him but just add to his agony, as will yours. Truly, all in all, as the victims of his manipulations, you and I are better off for our consciences are pure and in our minds we’re together, always.

Oh, that dreadful Philips. I must hurry now.

Sweetheart, dearly precious darling of mine. I haven’t seen your dear, sweet face since that time they took me away from you and marched me out of the hospital but know that I feel as close to you as ever. 

Much, much love, dearest Sherlock,

Mummy


End file.
